The Jagged Frontier
AI is genius at one task and useless at the near-identical one next to it. The line is invisible.
Grounded in the research on the jagged technological frontier
the shape of it
AI's ability isn't a smooth circle where everything inside is easy and everything outside is hard. It's jagged. Two tasks that look equally difficult sit on opposite sides of the line: one the model nails, the next one it fumbles. Write a sonnet? Easy. Write an exactly-50-word poem? It chokes. Same vibe, different side of the frontier. You can't see the edge until you've already crossed it.
where it came from
Coined in a September 2023 field experiment by Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Ethan Mollick, Karim Lakhani and six co-authors across Harvard, Wharton, MIT and BCG. They ran 758 real BCG consultants, 7% of the firm's junior workforce, on realistic tasks for a fictional shoe company, half armed with GPT-4. Not a lab toy. It was published in Organization Science. The point: find where AI helps versus where it quietly wrecks you.